My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not favorable.  Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond earrings.  They dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theater.  All this has changed.  The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in the world, and the women are dressed to perfection.  They are as clever at the demi-toilette as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and smartness of their walking-gowns are very refreshing after the floppy, blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa of which English girls, who used to be so tidy and “tailor-made,” now seem so fond.  The universal white “waist” is very pretty and trim on the American girl.  It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the free, a land where “class” hardly exists.  The girl in the store wears the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue.  It costs anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!

London when I come back from America always seems at first like an ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful and backward.  Above all, I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.

“Are you glad to get back?” said an English friend.

“Very.”

“It’s a land of vulgarity, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land—­a land of sunshine and light, of happiness, of faith in the future!” I answered.  I saw no misery or poverty there.  Every one looked happy.  What hurts me on coming back to England is the hopeless look on so many faces; the dejection and apathy of the people standing about in the streets.  Of course there is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans.  The Italians, the Russians, the Poles—­all the host of immigrants washed in daily on the bosom of the Hudson—­these are poor, but you don’t see them unless you go Bowery-ways, and even then you can’t help feeling that in their sufferings there is always hope.  The barrow man of to-day is the millionaire of to-morrow!  Vulgarity?  I saw little of it.  I thought that the people who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully.

When a man is rich enough to build himself a big new house, he remembers some old house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the technical skill and care that can be had in America.  This accounts for the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lakeside in Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere.  One millionaire’s house is modeled on a French chateau, another on an old Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is like an Italian palazzo.  And their imitations are never weak or pretentious.  The architects in America seem to me to be far more able than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.  It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of these splendid architects.